How to choose the right bachelor's, master's or PhD program: an in-depth look after admissions in Germany🇩🇪, the Netherlands🇳🇱 and a European joint master's🇪🇺

Hello~ I'm Owen! My time studying in Italy🇮🇹 is nearly over, and I'm getting ready to go back to LMU Munich🇩🇪 for my thesis. It's been a while since my last post, and this time I want to talk about a topic I've wanted to write about for a long time and finally found the right moment for:How do you choose the university or program that's right for you?

I'll list the factors I can think of for now. Readers, I'd love more feedback from you, so I can update the post from time to time with anything else worth discussing.

In case the wall of text is too much, you can open my Medium through the link below for the most complete explanation and summary. On Medium I've also mixed in my own photos of European scenery and useful links, which I hope will help you get through to the end!

How to choose the right bachelor's, master's or PhD program for you: an in-depth look after admissions to master's programs in Germany🇩🇪 and the Netherlands🇳🇱 and an Erasmus Mundus joint master's degree🇪🇺

My Medium: Yu-Jen Chen (Owen)

For how I applied to the program I'm in now, Erasmus Mundus MaMaSELF, open the link below!

Erasmus Mundus MaMaSELF application guide🇪🇺 | The admission letter that took me to Europe

Contents

1. Why do I want to study abroad?

2. Which country or city should I study in?

3. How should I choose my ideal university?

4. How do I find the program that suits me?

5. What collaboration opportunities can I get while studying?

6. Can I overcome the hard times?

7. What are the job prospects afterward?

1. Why do I want to study abroad?

Everyone answering this first question will have their own journey, maybe even a sudden impulse. Still, “self-exploration” is a very important step in making any decision, and that of course includes a big one like studying abroad.

Actually, “choosing Europe” is not the same as “choosing to study in Europe”. Once studying becomes one of your main reasons for coming to Europe, the challenges and setbacks you face are definitely not something a “tourist mindset” can get you through.

That said, you can start with a few simple attractions. Personally, I think this initial motivation can be big or small. Whether it starts from curiosity about foreign cultures, from your own interests like music or sports events, from wanting to work or emigrate abroad, or even “everyone's going abroad to study, so I'm going too,” it still counts as an answer.

If you make a hasty decision with only a vague motive, even if you make it abroad to study or work, you may well come home disappointed or fail to find the drive to keep going. So the right approach is to first find your own center point, then slowly extend outward to find clearer reasons and ways to act on them, so that your conviction stays unshakable.

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2. Which country or city should I study in?

Once you've settled on a few reasons to go abroad and pinned down the details, even the dreams you want to achieve, you can think further about where you'd be most likely to fulfill that dream list.

With Europe as the stage, traveling or working across borders isn't hard, but most of your daily life will still revolve around the country and city where your university is. So here are a few things to think through carefully:

☆ Culture

Every country has its own way of life. If you didn't look into it before you came, or never thought about how it would affect you, you may end up more frustrated after you arrive, but much of this can actually be prevented or avoided in advance.

For example: shops in Germany🇩🇪, especially in southern Germany (Munich, for instance), close around 8 p.m. And Sunday in Germany is basically a Ruhetag, which plainly means no shops open on Sundays. I once experienced in Leverkusen, Germany, what a truly empty city feels like.

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☆ Language

As soon as you leave Taiwan, you have to accept situations where you can't use Chinese. In most cases English is one of the tools you can use, but there's a fact people often overlook: English isn't the official language of every country. You can't assume everyone speaks English, nor can you expect the other person's English to be very good.

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☆ Weather

If, in Taiwan, the difference in weather between the north and south already sways your mood and affects whether you'd want to live there, abroad the weather factor gets magnified many times over. Take me in Italy🇮🇹 right now: compared with Germany, besides the reassuringly delicious Italian food, the other thing I can hardly believe is the warm weather.

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☆ Living costs

As long as you're living, food, clothing, housing and transportation are expenses you can't avoid. Monthly spending varies with how each person thinks about earning, saving and investing, but there are still certain benchmarks and minimum costs you can use as a reference when choosing a country and city to live in.

Here's a useful website I recommend: numbeo. With its data, you can easily compare living costs across cities, and use one city as a baseline to see how much each item costs by comparison.

Numbeo--cost of living

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☆ Career development

Just as many people in Taiwan🇹🇼 think of Hsinchu as the hub of Taiwan's high-tech industry, the industry strengths of different cities abroad are also worth taking time to research in depth if your goal is to work abroad.

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3. How should I choose my ideal university?

In this section I only want to discuss school rankings and campus culture. Program choice, course fit and so on are covered in detail in the next section.

a. School rankings

This is one of the very practical reasons. When studying abroad, besides hoping to learn educational ideas different from Taiwan's, getting into a more famous, more widely recognized university is one of the goals many people have.

Common rankings are QS, THE and US News, and for Germany🇩🇪 there's also the CHE Ranking, which is a very important indicator too

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b. Campus culture

Rankings are indeed one basis for judging how good a school is. However, not every brilliant student will thrive just by being placed in a highly ranked school. Setting aside the city's atmosphere and how hard the courses are, I think the differences in how each school is run also affect students' training, values and more.

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4. How do I find the program that suits me?

In my case, it's all materials science, but each university's materials department actually has different strengths and different requirements for how well your coursework fits. This is something to pay special attention to when shortlisting schools, and it's also why many students' motivation letters stand out. Basically, if you want to write a motivation letter with a great story or a tailored academic CV, you need to put a lot of time and effort into researching university departments.

Depending on the country you apply to, you can first filter by keywords through the relevant system. When I was choosing programs, after deciding I wanted to go to the Netherlands🇳🇱 and Germany🇩🇪 and to apply for the European joint degree Erasmus Mundus Program🇪🇺, I used the websites below for an initial screening, entering keywords like Materials Science, Sustainable, Renewable, Energy and Engineering, with English-taught programs as the focus, to find potential programs that suited me.

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5. What collaboration opportunities can I get while studying?

When weighing the pros and cons of each university and department, another point worth watching is the room for growth during your studies: whether the school or the program itself makes it easier to find internships or unusual thesis opportunities.

Take my program as an example. If you choose the University of Rennes or the University of Montpellier in France for the first year, the French track requires an internship in the second semester. Internship placements come through the program's recommendations plus your own choice, at partner research institutes such as the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France or PSI in Switzerland, where you do a simple project.

For thesis choices, you can refer to an article I wrote earlier. Because of special circumstances, I ended up coming back to LMU Munich (LMU) for my thesis. Even so, having more varied options within the original program, and being able to do research in another country or at a top European research institute at minimal cost, is a precious and one-of-a-kind experience.

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6. Can I overcome the hard times?

You leave Taiwan, your comfort zone, for an unfamiliar country. Living in Taiwan you may often complain about all its flaws, but abroad, many routines you took for granted reset to zero, and you have to learn to put up with all kinds of inconveniences.

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7. What are the job prospects afterward?

For people who worked hard to study abroad, whether you can stay and work in the country where you studied, and then decide whether to put down roots or return home and bring that experience to the Taiwanese job market, is also one of the key factors worth thinking over before you go.

Take Italy, where I'm studying now. Setting aside the unfair treatment I've had in exams at school, I'm actually quite happy with life and the weather in Italy. However, rigid social mobility, how much foreigners are shut out, the strict language requirements and so on are why I don't think continuing a STEM career in Italy is a wise move.

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I've written quite a lot, and I hope these small tips give you different perspectives to apply to your own life plans. Going abroad is a major decision. From a trip abroad to studying or working abroad, it all takes a certain cost to make happen. Of course, asking people with experience, going to talks, reading articles, and using every channel to gain knowledge and information is definitely a constructive thing to do.

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